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Check Out This Algorithm That Turns Tweets Into Poetry

Meet Pentametron. He’s a robotic Twitter account, but he’s not part of the spam variety – he turns tweets into Shakespeare-like poetry, using an algorithm to seek out and retweet the most poetic of our 140-character musings.
If you’re a fan of The Bard and you love technology, you’ll definitely want to give @Pentametron a follow. According to his Twitter bio, he retweets only the most poetic of tweets to create beautiful poetry:

Created by Ranjit Bhatnagar, Pentametron is an experiment that creates traditionally structured poetry out of some pretty non-traditional tweets.

Bhatnagar spoke to the Herald Sun about his little Twitter project, explaining how he is able to pick out poetry-like tweets from the over 2 billion tweets posted every week:

“If [the algorithm] knows all the words, it checks the [Carnegie Mellon University dictionary] dictionary for the stress patterns of the words, which add up to the rhythm of the tweet. If the rhythm seems to match the pattern of iambic pentameter, the tweet goes into a bin of potential lines of poetry. On average, about one in every 50,000 tweets qualifies.”

You can take a look at the strangely beautiful poetic creation below:

Pentametron.com gathers the 14 latest retweets and lays them out in an iambic pentameter poem. It might not be exactly Shakespeare, but it certainly speaks to modern culture and the things we see fit to tweet.